The rallying call to put European tech first — backed by companies including Airbus, Element, OVHCloud, Murena, Nextcloud, and Proton, to name a few — follows the shock of the Munich security conference, where U.S. Vice President JD Vance tore into Europe like an attack dog, leaving delegates in no doubt that the post-War international order is in tatters and all bets are off when it comes to what the U.S. might do under President Donald Trump.
Key tech infrastructure that’s owned and operated by U.S. companies doesn’t look like such a solid buy, from a European perspective, if a presidential executive order can be issued forcing U.S. firms to switch off service provision or terminate a supply chain at a pen stroke.
“Imagine Europe without internet search, email, or office software. It would mean the complete breakdown of our society. Sounds unrealistic? Well, something similar just happened to Ukraine,” Wolfgang Oels, COO of the Berlin-based, tree-planting search engine Ecosia — one signatory to the letter that was already taking steps aimed at reducing its dependency on U.S. Big Tech suppliers — tells TechCrunch.
Finally they recognize that there are alternatives to Google and Microsoft!
If OVH can run separate organizations structured so as to avoid targeting by the US and its CLOUD act, then so can Google; so can Microsoft.
If needs must, then AWS, Google and Azure will split and re-home themselves in Ireland, France, Switzerland – faced with a line that doesn’t go up, corporations will move figurative heaven and actual earth. If risk of enough revenue loss becomes an issue, then they would and will run a separate and distinct operation in each country; each region, if need be, if new Mexico fears Texas, for instance. And while they’ll all trumpet their success in creating a perfect privacy wall and legal separation to where even state powers cannot legally compel inspection or direction of their operations, after one of them is shown to be lying or incompetent the effort will be done properly. And we’ll have services we CAN trust - warily - to preserve our sovereignty.
But with their financial might, Google and Microsoft will respond to a real threat of churn. We will not see exodus.
“European tech industry calls for buying European tech” like no shit? I entirely agree, but what else would they suggest?
My guess they recognise they lack visibility: People think there are no alternatives to big tech but other than hardware we’re not that dependent, especially in software. It’s a matter of switching to local or open alternatives which are ready now.
I recently switched of Dropbox in favour of Hetzner’s hosted Nextcloud deployment and I’m very happy. One step at a time, I’ll work towards being rid of corporate US tech.
Also, if anyone here is using Notion, you should check out Suite Numerque’s Docs which is an open source competitor being developed by the French, German, and Netherlands governments. It’s looking very promising. There’s scratchpad here you can use to try it out.
We’ve been the US’ bitch for far too long. It will be extremely difficult and painful to become independent
I push for FOSS everywhere I can at work, but then we acquire a company and they casually drop “oh yeah we’ve built $solution on Azure Containers using Azure SDN with Azure API Gateway and Azure LoadBalancer and Azure Firewall and Azure Backups and Azure Georedundancy and we use Azure SAST and Azure pipelines (replace with microsoft marketing lingo as applicable - I don’t care to learn it). Aside from that we’re vendor-agnostic”.
It’s astonishing how “we can use Azure/AWS but let’s not lock ourselves into proprietary solutions for which FOSS alternatives are readily available” is somehow a controversial statement in some software outfits. Ignoring the sovereignty concerns for a minute, from a business perspective you’re essentially putting all your eggs in one basket and hoping really hard that Microsoft or Amazon don’t pull a Broadcom and bankrupt you one day by hiking prices a few hundred percent.
It boggles the mind how existentially reliant most of the digital world is on the whims of like, three unchecked billionaires.
All the more reason to do it. Better a hard struggle with freedom at the end than being someones bitch forever
as someone in the US, I would likely welcome some EU competition, the US is just a bunch of monopolies and trying to stay ahead of the enshitification is turning into a skill in itself, but now with the presidency akin to the paid programming infomercials, open markets are going to get worse as the convicted rapist shits diaper and gets upset with which ever CEO in the room winces at the smell first
Silver lining is that’s a great opportunity for development. Even more so, we’ve seen how things play out when such platforms are left unchecked, so we can try to avoid the downfalls of big tech.
@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu should be investing in opensource with much fervour. It keeps the keys out of the hands of a few and spreads the knowledge. Someone trained one closed system won’t have to relearn everything from another closed system. Countries will be able to adapt and solve issues across borders and efforts can be unified to secure software and infrastructure.
Its good to see this movement is growing by the day.
Gotta say ironic that this is posted on a platform that’s from Yahoo (which is from a US investment agency)
We don’t need to start with big products such as phones. Start small, such as moving off to a new email for personal use. Keep the gmail one for junk use (i.e: when signing up to services). Ask your closest friends to switch to Signal instead of WhatsApp. Use Firefox instead of Chrome (you can import all your browser settings). This process will take years and shouldn’t simply be a knee jerk reaction).
